1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a medical report generation apparatus, a medical report generation method and a medical report generation program for generating a medical report about image-based diagnosis of a patient.
2. Description of the Related Art
In image-based diagnosis in medical fields, a person in charge of generating a medical report reads and interprets a medical image obtained by imaging a patient, and generates the medical report that describes position information about a region of interest judged to be important for diagnosis, and to which a key image including the region of interest is attached. Further, a doctor or the like checks the generated medical report to diagnose the patient.
However, when only the key image attached to the medical report and the position information about the region of interest described in the medical report are provided, the information is insufficient for a doctor or the like in some cases to diagnose a patient while accurately recognizing the region of interest, such as the position and the size of a diseased part or the like. In such cases, the doctor or the like needs to obtain a supplementary image by manually retrieving an image in which the region of interest is recognizable from images of the patient obtained by imaging. That may impose time and work on the doctor or the like.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2010-182179 (Patent Document 1) discloses an apparatus that makes a doctor easily recognize the location of a lesion by generating and displaying a lesion location image representing the location of the lesion in a schematic diagram. The lesion location image is generated based on report data including information about the position of the lesion and schematic image data representing the schematic diagram illustrating the structure of an anatomical region in which the lesion is present.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Publication No. 2005-327302 (Patent Document 2) discloses an apparatus that displays a key image, which is a key for image-based diagnosis, and an image related to the key image in a medical report when a user displays and checks report data. The image related to the key image is generated from a picture archiving and communication system (PACS), based on report data generated by attaching the key image and an image processing parameter set necessary to generate the key image to the medical report, by using the image processing parameter set necessary to generate the key image or an image processing parameter set obtained by modifying the image processing parameter set necessary to generate the key image.
However, the method disclosed in Patent Document 1 indicates the location of a lesion in the schematic diagram. Therefore, the position of an actual region, skeleton or the like of a patient and an anatomical position in the schematic diagram do not sufficiently match with other. Hence, comparison has been difficult in some cases. Further, in the method disclosed in Patent Document 2, when a user displays and checks the medical report, the user needs to specify an image to generate and display the image related to the key image. Therefore, there has been a problem that selection of the image related to the key image is not easy for a user who is not used to an operation for appropriately changing an image processing parameter set and an operation for selecting the image related to the key image.